Charges and counter-charges over Montenegran assassination. Whom to believe? CIA spokesman or senior Milosevic aide?? Remember Sergio Aragones’ Spy vs. Spy? [Nando Times]

Big Brother is coming [Brill’s Content]

A reader commented on something that is painfully obvious to me — how slow this enormous blog page has been to load, especially for those of you who may well still have a dial-up connection as I do. I’m probably losing readers who are more impatient than you are about waiting for the page to come up. How frequently do you read Follow Me Here? Instead of ten days’ worth of my posts, I’ve just whittled it down to five days on the main page. Go back to the archives (link at the bottom) for older posts if you like. Let me know if this seems okay, and if it seems faster to download…

The Sunday Times: novelist James Delingpole is Young, Successful, Prosperous: I Could Just Kill Myself.

“How our ancestors would have laughed if we had mentioned

any of these perils to them. Rightly so, for such things could

be taken seriously only in an age so pampered and decadent

that it has to invent illusory dangers in order to replace real

ones that no longer exist. You do not agonise about animal

rights and gluten allergies when your family is starving; you do

not worry about Lyme disease in times of rampant

tuberculosis, typhus or bubonic plague; you have no urge to go

bungee jumping or white-water rafting when you are about to

be blown up on the western front.

We have all been spoilt rotten, that’s our problem.”

Salon: Billy and the bullies. I seem to have missed out. This is about a dispute between Billy Collins’ humble university press and blockbuster Random House over publication rights to some of his poetry. But Collins is supposed to be America’s most popular poet?? Oh, that’s it, sales figures had soared after two appearances on A Prairie Home Companion in 1998, and his poems are described as “funny and accessible.”

Feed: Legal rights for apes.

“Chimpanzees are our

closest biological relatives, sharing 98.4 percent of our DNA…

Because the similarities between us are so compelling, there is

no ethical justification for the difference in legal status.”

A FAQ from the Guardian about the National Missile Defense plan, “son of Star Wars.” Learn more about this issue! Major problems with the plan: (1) it’s made to deal with a nonexistent threat, nuclear attacks by “rogue states”. It could legitimately be perceived, therefore, as a stalking horse for a more large-scale program directed against other nuclear powers.(2) It will utterly destabilize hard-won arms control measures that have kept the real danger of the strategic arms race at bay. (3) Technologically, it won’t work. (4) If funded, it would be a massive windfall for the ailing aerospace corporations which can’t afford it to be found unnecessary or unfeasible. (5) It looks like the Administration is pushing us towards implementation at least partially to position Gore better against his more hawkish opponent. (6) There’s little effective public opposition because most people have been lulled into complacency about the continuing dangers of the arms race by the “end of the Cold War”, most people think it’s a non-issue because they think we already have a Star Wars defense system (since the Reagan years), and most people don’t make foreign policy issues a factor in their voting decisions. [By the way, here’s a wonderful resource, the entire archive of FAQs, which the Guardian calls “The Issue Explained”, on a range of topics in the news deserving further explanation.]

Before leaving the issue, read why Jonathan Schell, author of the seminal disarmament tract The Fate of the Earth and, most recently, of The Gift of Time: The Case for Abolishing Nuclear Weapons Now, calls today The Second Age of Nuclear Danger:

In short, the post-Cold War period has turned out to be less hospitable to nuclear arms control than the Cold War. Why has the end of

the great global conflict in whose name almost all nuclear weapons were built been followed by the near-collapse across the board of the

world’s efforts to control these weapons? Why has peace been worse for nuclear disarmament than cold war?

[Boston Review]

[Slate]: Timothy Noah notices something funny about Bayer. As part of the IG Farben German industrial conglomerate, the pharmaceutical giant was a key

player in the Final Solution (“it manufactured the Zyklon B used to

gas Jews in the death chambers; it designed ovens used to

incinerate the corpses; and it used as slave laborers those Jews

at Auschwitz who were still alive”) and has recently just barely, in a sense, acknowledged its role by conceding massive financial reparations to Holocaust survivors. Best known for Bayer aspirin, it has just decided that the next product for which it will create brand-name recognition is Bayer Advanced Home, a highly efficient poison to kill household pests. “Bayer, though dunderheaded enough to trumpet its valuable

brand name in a TV commercial that will remind people of this

history, was, sadly, just smart enough to deny Chatterbox’s

request to view the ad in question (and to instruct its ad firm to

do the same).”